How bout messing with the gear ratios on a winch on say, a f250 diesel with power take off option? Have your boy sit in the cab and drag you across the pond. It could be done, not by me, but that would be sweet. 500lb/ft winching!

I'm not sure it would be quite like a wakeboard winch. I haven't seen one in person, but isn't the clutching mechanism one of those "soft start" so it gets the rider up to speed? A modded pto would be off/on and with changed ratio, it would be arm ripping.

Well PTO winches are cheap when you can find them. The actual PTO to drive it is not unless you get a great score on a used one that will match up to your transfer case or transmission. Beyond that you'd have to make a driveshaft to power the winch. Alternatively you could do a hydraulic winch (more $$$) with a hydraulic pump on the PTO ($$$). Either way a hydraulic setup probably wouldn't cut it for high speed winching.

Granted a PTO winch would give you what? 10 gears? 12 maybe since I believe the new trucks use the ZF6 trans? Either way to pull a wakeboarder you're only going to use 1 gear... Whichever one gets you at the right speed at an acceptable RPM (a high idle would probably be sufficient to pull a wakeboarder smoothly at speed).

As for a smooth start, just be real easy letting the clutch out. Would take a driver with some finesse to not yank your arms out starting in a high gear as it won't take much to accelerate to speed, and starting in a lower gear and shifting would be kinda rough on the rider. So yeah, neat idea but I don't think it's really practical.

Because thats insane overkill. Like the other guys are saying, it would go all wookie on you and rip your arms off. It would burn more fuel than a conventional winch. You dont need that much power, and its just a bit of a waste to have it. Its not going to perform better than any winch that is currently used, so why bother with the extra expense/hospital bills.